MONU

Monu – or 'Magazine On Urbanism' – has the same feeling of potential magic for a magazine-lover that a pouch of gemstones at an incense stall at a country fair might have for a ten-year-old girl (sticking pretty close to home with that analogy). However, one of those things ends up covered in dust and the other actually aids you in channelling Jeff Buckley.

It's not a great magazine, but it's an interesting one. It comes out of an architect's firm in the Netherlands (though it is in English), it's biannual with a very small print-run (2000 copies), it's entirely black and white, its paper stock is compellingly thick and its pages are filled with messy design – multiple typefaces, white font on black squares, lots of tiny photographs. Ultimately it begins and ends with its design. And I'm not convinced that I even like its design.

Perhaps I am being harsh. They are doing pretty great things with their content. Monu explores different facets of, yes, urbanism, and it is a clever way to themetise a magazine. Previous issues have included 'Beautiful Urbanism', 'Middle Class Urbanism', 'Denied Urbanism' and 'Political Urbanism'. The issue I bought is the most recent, 'Holy Urbanism'. Contributors are mainly architects, urban planners, designers, and any given title in between, which is fantastic, and the content reflects these interests.

I was mildly engaged. Some essays were incredibly long, dense and without pictures, and I often caught my eyes reading the words as my brain crept into the forbidden zone of my recently defunct relationship – the perfect ruse.

There were a few very tasty bites. One was a short article on the 'eruv' of Manhattan. An eruv – meaning a legal aggregation of property – is basically a clever invention by Jewish community leaders to loosen the law of carrying on the Sabbath. And when I say carrying, I mean carrying. Kids, bread, anvils or feathers – you can't pick a thing up lest the fate of eternal damnation be placed upon your soul. To circumnavigate this biblical heeding, Rabbis have strung wire around the borders of Jewish communities so that people can carry stuff around (within that perimeter) by claiming it is for the greater good of those inhabitants: he's carrying bread for everyone. A really great article for this theme. Another good one was a piece about Mormon churches, and the expedient measure of global building due to the streamlined design of the actual church. "In 2000, for example, 28 of the 34 temples built are identical, then there is no 'original' in any sense." Accompanying this article are thumb-sized pictures of the facades of the 128 Mormon temples as of August 2008. I really enjoyed that one, too.

The inter-nationality of Monu's contributors gives it a brilliant array of perspectives, and their respective fields of interest makes for great reading. This is a magazine for people in those industries or people with a general interest in the way communities create towns and cities. It's a great idea and often executed with aplomb.

But then there were the eight pages of inexplicable designs of space in 2100 slash Escher rip-offs that had the infuriating narrative of a stoned spoken word poet trying to recount last night's dream. I just couldn't do it. But then again, maybe it was pure genius. I'll never know.

"The Demiurge ruthlessly throws his highways around. Hippocrits only manage to loop his gigantic vertical roundabouts when launched through the AcceleraTor. Hippocrits race to the loop park and descend into the underground. They take their seats. Mother 9 leaves her vehicle and becomes a normal pig again. Naked, she hobbles her last metres towards the finish and enters the rocket. Behind the black ClubClub twin, she breaks through the ground and launches into space like fireworks. All Hippocrits return to the surface, mount their steel studs and race back to their generic villas and compounds."

Jesus Christ, Speedism! Wind it up! And also, what was your mum thinking, calling you Speedism? With a name like that of course you'll end up a cyber goth Alan Ginsberg.

As an editor-geek though, I became increasingly frustrated with the terrible editing. Perhaps it's because the editors are not native English speakers, but it got down to punctuation marks, man. Decide if you're gonna use an en-dash or an em-dash and space them consistently. Decide if you're using English spelling or American spelling. Do a find for your double spaces and delete them. And for christsakes spell the name of your sponsors correctly, because some of us don't even have any. God I'm a crank.

I was happy to come across Monu and I'm glad a bought a copy. I won't be buying another in a hurry but I would recommend it, if that makes sense.



www.monu-magazine.com

BIDOUN

I'm on my second issue of Bidoun. That's pretty good going for a magazine that costs $19.95 in Australia. The bottom of the second copy I have – Winter 2009 (pictured above) – is warped and crinkled because a can of premixed gin and tonic (classy stuff) that I was carrying in my backpack with the newly-purchased Bidoun was mysteriously pierced in transit, leaching to a height of about 8cm. It took a few days to dry out, and I had to carefully un-stick the pages each morning before replacing it back on the window sill.

BUT WHO CARES because the magazine is so great. An arts and culture journal that is published out of New York offices and contains content solely about or from the Middle East, Bidoun is classy and cool and interesting and funny and really well designed. Each issue is themed – the damaged copy in question is 'Kids' – and strikes a really nice balance of art and reading material. Aesthetically, it's the magazine-lovers wet dream, with different paper stocks, perforated pages, weird fold-outs and flaps. Its layout is busy but sharp (how I do dislike minimalist layout), with plenty of designy title pages and headers. Another good decision was to put the advertising (all for international art galleries) in the first 20 pages, leaving the rest of the mag freed up for the good stuff. My hats off to Babak Radboy and Jiminie Ha – very swish.

But what Bidoun does best is bring young stories and art with a Middle Eastern focus to an otherwise fairly ignorant Western peer group. It challenges one-dimensional preconceptions without so much as nodding to them, and divides the broad term 'Middle Eastern culture' into its many parts by bringing together voices from vastly different regions.

Invariably, the subjects of the 'Artist Projects', photographic essays, interviews and true stories are particularly fascinating and there is a good smattering of politics. It takes the piss with panache, and is polished off with three disgusting regional recipes on the last page. It also contains reviews, an international exhibition listing and a glossary of need-to-know Arabic phrases.

I would wager it takes its cues from The New Yorker (and poaches its writers) but aims for a younger, more poppy audience. It's everything Vice could never be.






www.bidoun.com